1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of wireless communication, and in particular, to wireless communication methods for repeated transmission/reception of channels (channel repetitions), and wireless communication devices such as eNode B (eNB) and user equipment (UE).
2. Description of the Related Art
Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is an important revenue stream for operators and has a huge potential from the operator's perspective. Based on the market and operators' requirements, one of the important requirements of MTC is improving the coverage of MTC UEs. To enhance the MTC coverage, almost each of the physical channels needs to be enhanced. And the repeated transmission/reception in time domain is the main method to improve the coverage of the channels. The repeated transmission/reception is to repeatedly transmit/receive a channel or to repeatedly transmit/receive a signal on the channel, the channel or the signal on the channel, which is repeatedly transmitted/received, is referred as the channel repetitions. And to satisfy multiple different coverage requirements, multiple repetition levels can be supported while each of the repetition level corresponds to one or multiple integral repetition numbers. The repetition number is a number of repetitions of the channel in the repeated transmission. Each of the repetitions will be transmitted in one subframe; therefore, multiple subframes will be used for transmitting the repetitions of the channel.
For uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) data transmission, HARQ (Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request) process can be used. In each HARQ process, control channel and data channel are included, and sometimes a feedback channel (ACK/NACK channel) for the data packet can also be included. The control channel carries the scheduling information of the data packet. The data channel carries the data packet and is transmitted in the way indicated by the control channel. When the receiver received the data packet and decoded it successfully, information of ACK (Acknowledgement) is transmitted to the data transmitter to inform the successful decoding. Otherwise, NACK (Negative-Acknowledgement) is transmitted.